One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street Page 9

  “I’ve had it!” said Mr. Stott, who dreamed of wearing a tall hat to cover his bald spot, and fancy suits and shiny shoes, instead of overalls and boots.

  Over the years, one by one, he began to rip out the Valencias, chopping the wood for cordwood, replacing the trees with a new crop. As a tribute to my fallen brethren, Mr. Stott named this street Orange. I say its true name is Street of Blossoms, Gone Forever.

  And what was that new crop? Houses! A grove of houses. And, eventually, a fire station, a warehouse, a McDonald’s, a strip mall, a school . . . I am the only orange tree remaining, saved by old man Stott’s young neighbor, Ethel Finneymaker, who lived across the street.

  “Mr. Stott, please, please, please let this tree live!” young Ethel had pleaded. She and her friend Gertrude liked to climb to my topmost branch and hang upside down from their bony knees.

  When old man Stott died, Mrs. Stott sold this last little plot, which has had fourteen tenants and three owners over the years.

  If I could speak, I would tell you everything. When I sense danger, I can only hope. Yet, truly, I am so grateful for the time, for all the moments of my long and fruitful life. I spend my daylight hours watching and counting and remembering:

  Five marriage proposals under my branches. Two yeses, three nos.

  One backyard wedding, another rained out.

  Fifty-eight babies cooing beneath me.

  Seventeen small graves scattered nearby: cats, a macaw, a puppy, turtles, and assorted fish.

  Two hundred and fifty-three barbecues.

  Nine lightning bolts that just missed me.

  Two hundred and one balls that didn’t.

  Three fires on the property.

  One thousand gallons of morning juice.

  Two runaway girls whispering in sleeping bags.

  Nine broken arms, three broken legs, five sprained wrists, seventy-three bruises.

  And the countless poems and drawings I’ve inspired.

  And the earthquake tremors (only one causing branches to crack).

  And the morning sunrises, some more amazing than others.

  And all the crawling, buzzing, pecking, swooping, chattering beings I’ve sheltered.

  As the night air cools, I stop counting. Instead I think about all your stories buried deep in the clay soil, nourishing my tough, old roots.

  arry and Pug were brothers, but if you happened to see them together on Orange Street in 1967, you wouldn’t even think they were related. Not that they really hung out together. Larry could finish his homework in thirty minutes flat, which gave him plenty of time to race out the door and play ball with his friends. He was good at that.

  His little brother, Pug, was mostly good at collecting rocks, drawing, and dreaming. Pug had a turned-up nose, so everyone called him Pug. “Slow” was something else that they called Pug, and “strange,” too. (No one would use those names in front of Larry, of course, or they would have been punched out.)

  Pug had an icy-blue stone, which he’d found on the beach in Santa Monica, and he was always taking it out of his pocket, holding it up to the sun. He said it brought him good luck because it was heart-shaped.

  “It doesn’t even look like a heart,” Larry said.

  But Pug said, “It only looks like a heart to the person who finds it. That’s what makes it special.”

  The way Larry figured it, it was as if a giant hand threw a bunch of their parents’ genes up into the air. When the genes landed, some of those genes became Larry, and some became Pug. It was all luck, and Pug’s stone wasn’t helping him much. Larry knew he’d gotten the better deal.

  Larry was tall and speedy like his mom, Marisa. Pug got her red hair, except his mother’s was long enough to sit on. But you hardly ever found Marisa just sitting around. She did everything speedily, including her cooking and cleaning. Sometimes the boys would come home from school and find her on her hands and knees, using orange halves to wash the kitchen floor, rocking back and forth with the beat from the kitchen radio, or her own singing. (Like Larry, her favorite group was The Beatles; her favorite song was “Santa Maria” because that was her hometown.) Only the nice, clean smell remained when the stickiness was washed off. She baked pies with tender crusts, and cakes with frosted pictures on top because she loved to draw, like Pug. She made lots of ambrosia, Larry’s and Pug’s favorite dessert—ambrosia made of oranges, coconut, and sugar, all layered together in a sugary glop. Everyone said it was the best around—even Ethel Finneymaker across the street, who gave Marisa Tilley the recipe. That’s because Marisa used the sweetest oranges from the highest branches of the backyard tree, which, believe it or not, she could reach, with the help of her long fruit pole—except for one big orange at the very top.

  “If I could just reach that one orange,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe the ambrosia I’d make! And all our wishes would come true.”

  Some of Larry’s friends would laugh because his mother was taller than his dad.

  “That’s not the way it’s s’posed to be!” they’d shout, and Larry would have to punch them out.

  But his dad, Ralph Tilley, was strong, even though he was short and skinny. The dogs never threatened him on his long mail route; Mr. Tilley knew how to stare them down. Some of those dogs weren’t as gentle as Larry’s old dog, Cream. Ralph Tilley’s muscular arms were good for reaching under a sink to fix a leak, or hammering nails in his backyard tool shed, or playing catch with his sons. He had blue eyes like Larry, which were handsome to look at, except when they were icy-blue like Pug’s stone. That’s what Mr. Tilley’s eyes looked like when he was angry. He didn’t get angry often, although he didn’t like it much when Pug dropped the ball in a game of catch, or forgot to put “I” before “E,” except after “C.” And one time those eyes got icy-blue for something Larry wanted to do. Larry never forgot that.

  It was late one Sunday afternoon in early spring, and the orange blossoms were still perfuming the backyard. Larry and his dad were playing catch, and Pug was leaning up against the trunk of the orange tree, drawing in a big pad with a stubby pencil. Every time he finished a picture, he’d tear it from the pad and lay it out on the ground, one of his many stones holding it down. He drew a small cloud that happened to look like an igloo; a fat beetle with pincers; Mitzi, the cat from across the street, lounging under the tree with old Cream. And then he drew Mrs. Tilley, resting for a bit on the back stairs, a sprig of bougainvillea in her hair, which Mr. Tilley had pinned there.

  Mr. Tilley looked over at all of Pug’s drawings, and laughed. Then he said what he always said. “Hey, artsy-fartsy, what’s the point of drawing? It’s a big waste of time when the real thing is right in front of your nose!”

  Larry could see those drawings, too. I can draw just as well! he thought. Even better! He knew how good it felt to capture the shape of a beetle, its hard shell shaded just right on the page. Drawings said, Look! You’ll see things you’ve never noticed before, even if they’re right in front of your nose. Larry wished he could sit down beside Pug, with his own stubby pencil, right out there in the open, instead of hiding behind the bougainvillea bush. That’s where he usually drew in secret. Every now and then, he’d even write a poem on the page, to go with the drawing. The poems were nothing fancy, just words he liked. Poems could be short, but still say a lot. He liked that about poems.

  Of course, after he finished a drawing or a poem, Larry would crumple it up and throw it away. He could see no real purpose in drawing, and boys didn’t write poems, his dad said.

  That afternoon, in the backyard, he got a great idea, out of the blue. Larry decided to make comic strips, just like the ones in the newspaper, except they would be about the kids on Orange Street and all the stuff they did together. And his dad could make copies of it on the mimeograph machine down at the post office, and Larry could charge ten cents a copy. Making some money, that’s what the purpose would be.

  But when his dad saw him scribbling and drawing under the tree, his eyes g
ot that icy-cold look, and he said, “You, too? I told you, that artsy-fartsy stuff is not what men do.”

  But men did go to war. Around that time, the U.S. was fighting a war in faraway Vietnam, and Mr. Tilley enlisted in the army.

  “It’s my chance to see the world,” he said to Mrs. Tilley. “To fight for my country!”

  And to Larry and Pug he said, “Vietnam’s a beautiful place, boys, with rice paddies and emerald jungles and dragon fruit and flying frogs.”

  Larry got the feeling that Orange Street, with its gray mourning doves and cracked sidewalks and single citrus tree could never compete with that beautiful place.

  One day their father hugged the dog, kissed everyone good-bye, and told his family not to worry when he was gone.

  “I’m bringing my good-luck stone,” he said. Pug had given him his heart-shaped stone, and Mr. Tilley looked like he believed in it almost as much as Pug did.

  Their dad wrote that he’d volunteered to be a tunnel rat—a soldier who crawled into small spaces to flush out the enemy. It was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war. “It’s a good thing I’m not a big man,” he wrote. “I fit just fine in those tunnels. But don’t worry. All I’ve met in a tunnel is one scared chicken!”

  Larry wrote to him about baseball and hot days and Cream’s fleas. He didn’t tell him that Mrs. Tilley went around looking sad all the time, her long hair unbrushed; that she was not doing much cleaning, or singing, or drawing with frosting anymore. He didn’t tell him his dad had left a great big hole, like the hole in Larry’s mouth when a tooth fell out, which he couldn’t help touching with his tongue.

  One day Pug drew a picture of their dad with his beard, before he shaved it off for the army, and his blue eyes, as warm as an L.A. sky in summer. And that’s when Larry started drawing again, too. His pictures were of the four of them having a picnic under the orange tree, or sitting around the kitchen table, everybody ready to dig into a boysenberry pie or last summer’s fruit preserved for cold-weather eating.

  You could tell it was winter because there were raindrops at the window, and you’d know the kitchen smelled like oranges, because it always did.

  His dad wrote that he’d saved someone’s life. He wrote that his best friend had died. He wrote about the mud and the dark and the clattering helicopters and jungle heat. Sometimes, for weeks, he didn’t write at all.

  One afternoon Pug asked his mother, “How do you spell Vietnam, anyway?”

  She told him it was spelled “Vietnam,” not “Veitnam,” as he’d written it. She told him how to spell other words, too, like “platoon” and “battalion” and “infantry.” Then, after Pug had checked things over and over, because he really wanted to get it right, he put a bunch of drawings into an envelope and mailed them off to his father.

  That’s when Larry learned the most important thing about drawing, something he’d known, deep down, all along. Homemade pictures said, This is home. Come back safe and sound. We love you and we are thinking about you every minute— even if the artist didn’t write down a single word.

  To Larry’s big surprise, Mr. Tilley had learned the same thing in the jungles of Vietnam. He didn’t think those drawings were artsy-fartsy at all anymore.

  “NOTHING here is as nice as those pictures,” he wrote back. “Keep them comin’! I miss you all like crazy! I’ll be home real soon. I’m going to build a tree house for you guys. And, for your mom, I’ll set up some raised beds for tomato plants and sunflowers. Oh, boy, can’t wait to take you all to a Dodgers game!”

  So Larry drew, too, one picture after another, his initials marked at the bottom of each one. He hoped the drawings themselves would bring their dad home from Vietnam sooner.

  That would be their dad’s last letter. The family was told that Ralph Tilley found more than a chicken in those tunnels. He was hit by a piece of a booby trap while he was crawling through one of them. He didn’t return from Vietnam, but their letters and those drawings did. They came back with their father’s shaving stuff, his clothes, and Pug’s blue stone. And Mr. Tilley’s body was laid to rest in Los Angeles at a military funeral with horns blowing.

  After a while, Pug got it into his head to pin up the drawings in the tool shed. “I will leave them there forever,” he said. He put his blue stone on a shelf in the shed, too.

  “You are so dumb!” Larry said. “He’s never coming home to see them. There’s no purpose in doing that!”

  Larry had never called Pug dumb before. But this was a dumbness that had nothing to do with being terrible at arithmetic and spelling, and the forgetting of simple things: This was a dumbness that had to do with not realizing everything had changed. But Pug just kept looking at those pictures in the tool shed, and crying. His mother cried, too. Larry was too angry to cry.

  Other things made Larry angry, too. Their mother was singing again, but in a sad voice now. That’s how Larry found out she didn’t want to live on Orange Street anymore. Sure enough, one day Mrs. Tilley told her boys they were moving to Santa Maria to live with her parents.

  But what made Larry angriest of all was Pug’s blue stone. He thought that Pug was dumb to think it could bring good luck. And he was angry at his father for believing that, too, even though being angry at a dead person felt dumb.

  The day before they moved to Santa Maria, it was so hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. Not that they had time to test that out, with all the packing they had to do. Their dog, Cream, had decided to disappear, spooked by all the boxes. The boys had been calling for him all day, and that was really tough. But worst of all, it was Larry’s birthday, and his mother, sweaty and exhausted from packing, had forgotten. Larry waited all day, thinking maybe she had a cake or a pie or a small gift, hidden away as a surprise. But no dice.

  “Tell her,” said Pug.

  “Nah,” said Larry. “Why should I tell my mother when it’s her own son’s birthday? And don’t you tell, either!”

  Sometimes it felt like he needed to keep finding more stuff to be angry about, just to feed the anger, like a fire burning inside of him.

  It usually cooled off when it got dark, but the heat woke him up early the next morning, before dawn. Larry lay there for a while, getting angrier and angrier. Then he jumped out of bed. Barefoot and in his pajamas, Larry raced out to the backyard tool shed.

  He took down the old preserve jar where his dad had kept his nails. Out went the nails, and into the jar went his father’s last letter, as well as a poem Larry had wanted to send him. He grabbed a garden trowel and ran out to the backyard, where he buried that jar, holding all its dead promises. Then he remembered the blue stone and went back to get it. Scraping the dirt with his bare hands, he plopped the stone into the same hole, then covered it up.

  But Larry wasn’t finished. He found his father’s matches in the tool shed and began to burn up all the drawings, one by one. And before Larry could stop it, one corner of a drawing, a little ember, really, burst into a flame again. One split second is all it took! The flame leaped up, like a long tongue, to lick the polka-dotted curtain high up at the little window. First the wall, then the whole shed was on fire! Larry stood frozen, staring at the flames, too terrified to move.

  It was Pug who saved him, racing into the shed. Just as Larry could draw really well, Pug could run fast when he needed to. He yanked his brother out through the tool shed door, yelling, “Mom, anyone, please! Help us!”

  Mrs. Tilley pulled out the garden hose and Larry and Pug ran back and forth with buckets of water. Flames began to spread to the dry weeds surrounding the shed. Someone must have called the fire station because soon the sirens were screaming down Orange Street. The shed and garden were hosed down with bigger hoses from the fire trucks.

  As the sun slowly rose they got the fire under control at last. Neighbors who had wandered into the yard to help or gawk returned to their homes. Larry, Pug, and Mrs. Tilley sank to the ground against the chain-link fence, exhausted.

  “Who started it?” Mrs
. Tilley finally asked.

  Pug said, “It was an accident.”

  But Mrs. Tilley stared hard at Larry. Suddenly her face softened. “Yesterday was your birthday,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  And that’s when Larry began to cry. “It was me,” he said. “I did it. I was burning the drawings.”

  His mother pulled him close, whispering, “I understand.”

  A few embers were still sizzling and fizzling around the trunk of the orange tree, where water from the hoses had pooled. It was as if the tree itself had willed the fire to go no further.

  Enough.

  Mrs. Tilley slowly got up and went to pick an orange from a lower branch. “This is your gift,” she said, handing the orange to Larry. “I’m much too tired to climb to the top for the highest one, but believe me, all these oranges are special. Make yourself a birthday wish.”

  They sat down on the back stairs for the very last time, and Larry peeled the orange. Its sharp perfume made the air smell less smoky. He shared the juicy chunks with his mother and Pug, so that their wishes would come true, too. The orange tasted tart, but mostly sweet, because that’s what hot summer days will do. Larry wished for happier times, for all of them. He felt happier already.

  The moving van rumbled down Orange Street. After their belongings were loaded and Larry and Pug had yelled for Cream one more time, and he’d finally crawled out from his hiding place under the back porch, they all piled into their car and followed the van to Santa Maria.

  The house on Orange Street was rented many times over, until years later, an earthquake shook its foundation. That’s when they knocked down the house and what was left of the shed. Nobody ever built them up again.

  Much later, Larry figured out a few things.

  An orange could be a pretty good birthday gift.

  A blue stone was just a blue stone, except when it helped you think about other things.